Snapshots from the Past

It's been nearly a month and half since I arrived in Israel, and to say that I've experienced and learned a good deal since arriving is a pretty dramatic understatement. I can't recount all of the experiences that I've had during this time, but I do want to provide some snapshots here of the evolution in my thinking about the area and the various communities and geographies I have wondered through...

23 September: Port Inn, Haifa
I'm in a pretty garden patio in back of the Port Inn hostel in downtown Haifa. A gropu of very American college boys is talking too loudly about lap dances "someting about them being "not so cool") at a table on the other side fo the patio. Ben and I left Be'er Sehva late yesterday, after I spetn the orning trying to arrane the logistics of my study adn work here. By teh time we left, it was after 3pm, and we were both grumy on our train ride to Natanya.

I'm still working out exactly how to engaged in my primary work goal: supporting Palestinian-Israeli public health cooperation by creating a program in health information technology and new media. It's a lofty goal, and I'm keenly aware of my cultural and political ignorance here, my general outlier status -- as soon as speech happens or an interaction takes place, I'm instantly outside. And I tend to be impatient about perfecting my arrangements immediately. Ben Gurion University in the Negev is a fabulous university, with a stated community and public service orientation and rooted in the sociocultural complexities of the Negev Desert in the south of Israel, home to its 150,000 Bedouin and much of its ever-growing new immigrant population. At the same time, much of my work will be centered around Jerusalem, and I find myself pulled there not just strategically, but for its color and complexity, its people and politics, and its endlessly overlapping layers of story and history and meaning. Part of my difficulty here is located simply in something like immigration syndrome and culture clash -- at this point all I can ask of myself is to absorb as much of the language and local knowledge as possible and have faith that I'll gain clarity and belonging as my year unfolds.

Next, there's the tension within me wiht regards to my relationship with Israel (this is going to be a more contentious topic of discussion throughout, so be forewarned). Israel is a hard country ot get to know, and it's very protective of itself and its version(s) of history. It aspires to be and feels Middle Eastern and European at the same time. It struggles to be on the right side of history, while at the same time there's a general feeling off oppression and ostracism that seems shared by the Jewish Israeli collective -- we are here because there is no place else. Accept Israel and Isralies and they will embrace you with open arams, stuff you iwth hummus and invite you to dine at their table for the Sabbath. I've neer had so many friendly strangers stop to help me just by looking quizically at a map. At the same time, the oppose is true if you find yousrelf on the wrong side, or at least it puts you in a difficult position because any admission of moral ambiguity leads back to certain questions about Israel's right to exist and the correctness of all it has fought for and achieved. And even if I want to think of myself as open-minded, taht's a question that as an American Jew, I have a gut-chelnghtingly hard time allowing myself to even consider. It must be somehow possible to criticize or critique without raising existential questions.

To a very real extent, I think that part of my task here will be tring to explore as many stories and versions and face of the prism as possible.

THE SHORE OF THE KINNERET
Tonight, on a rocky shore on the mystical Sea of Galilee, I found a friend camped in a sukkah on the beach, and together we explored our way through a moonlit 8th Century CE Palace. Wrapped in warm autumnal night air, we wandered through giant rooms with still standing walls of massive stone -- limestone piled on basalt, composite 130o year-old concrete filling in the gaps, giant pillars, and the broken but still perfect marble plating of walls and floors with designs still visible. Floors are tiled and patterned, covered over by a thin layer of sand. We crawled through tunnels and poked our way into rooms half excavated, climbed ancient stone walls and sifted through the sand to find pieces of broken clay pottery, smooth and perfectly carved and shaped. The top of an altar-like inset space in a great room had a symbol carved into it, like rays of a sun. Small pillars that look more like rayed pyramids were scattered around rooms, and ancient drainage tunnels ran through their floors.

We discovered the astounding cleverness of its 8th century builders - - notched stones to protect from earthquakes, the geometric center stones of massive arches, indentions in the floors to create hinges for enormous closing doors, knotches in the walls to hold the marble plating in place more securely. We sat in an ancient stone bath tub, all of one limestone piece, and looked at the stars, dulled only slightly by the distant lights of Tiberias across the waters. We discovered owl pellets and still perfect skulls of tiny animals. We tracked jackels into their tunnels and listened to their packs yelping in the distance, and we followed the trail of a porcupine into a tunneled room until we couldn't get any further. We ate the sweet fruits fallen from date palms growing from the Holy Land in the middle of an ancient palace at midnight on the shores of the Galilee. And we wandered home through its waters, warmer as you wade deeper, and felt the mysticism and the spirit of the place infusing us as we walked.

Israel today is a complicated and contested world, full of competing story lines and overlapping claims. In a land without certainty, there is truth - in the magic in the night air of the Galilee, a sunset over the ancient walls of Akko, a lone olive tree on the rocky slope below Jerusalem. Here there is spirituality enough to go around.